Medication carts are utilized for various purposes throughout a healthcare facility and elsewhere. For example, medication carts storing a plurality of different medications may be deployed to the various floors or other units of a hospital or healthcare facility in order to provide a secure repository for the medications prescribed for the patients on the floor or other unit. One type of medication cart is an anesthesia cart utilized by anesthesiologists in the operating room and elsewhere. An anesthesia cart stores the various medications employed by an anesthesiologist as well as the other items used for dispensing those medications, such as syringes, gloves, etc.
A medication cart, such as an anesthesia cart, generally includes a plurality of drawers with each drawer having a plurality of compartments for storing different medications. Each drawer is generally locked and within certain drawers, there are compartments that have a lid or a plurality of lids which are also locked. As such, access to the various medications may be controlled. Although the drawers and the individual compartments may be locked by means of a key lock or other mechanical locking mechanism, anesthesia carts have been developed in which the locking mechanism of the drawers and the individual compartments are controlled by a computer. As such, an anesthesiologist or other user of a computer controlled anesthesia cart would log into the computer and provide information, such as user name and password, from which the anesthesiologist or other user could be identified as an authorized user. In one configuration, the user could then select a particular medication and the computer would direct the anesthesia cart to unlock the drawer and the respective compartment within which the selected medication is stored. In another configuration that provides somewhat increased control over the dispensation of the medications, the user could identify a patient, select a prescription or other order associated with the patient and request access to one of the medications prescribed or ordered for the patient with the computer then instructing the anesthesia cart to unlock the drawer and the respective compartment within which the respective medication is stored, if the user is authorized to access the anesthesia cart and the patient has been prescribed or otherwise ordered the medication selected by the user.
While anesthesia or other medication carts may provide control over the medications stored therein by requiring an authorization and access control process, such as described above, to be individually repeated for each medication stored by the anesthesia cart for which access is desired, the authorization and access control process may be undesirably time-consuming. For example, in instances in which an anesthesiologist or other user desires to withdraw multiple medications from the anesthesia cart, the authorization and access control process must be repeated for each medication which may require the anesthesiologist or other user to expend a meaningful amount of time simply opening and closing multiple drawers and, in turn, the multiple compartments that store the requested medication. As such, it would be desirable to provide an improved medication cart for securely controlling access to the medications stored therein, while permitting the medications to be accessed in a more efficient and timely manner.
The contents of the medication cart must frequently be inventoried in order to determine the type and quantities of medication remaining in the medication cart. For example, an inventory of a medication cart may need to be conducted each day. In order to conduct an inventory of a medication cart, each drawer and, in turn, each compartment within a drawer must be individually accessed and the contents of each compartment must be counted. As described above, the individual access to each compartment within a medication cart may take a significant amount of time since each compartment must be individually unlocked and opened and the contents therewithin must be counted. In addition, since the compartments generally hold the drugs in a random grouping and the drugs within the compartments can be stacked one on top of the other, the individual drug containers sometimes need to be removed from the compartments so as to obtain an accurate count. As such, it would be desirable to provide an improved medication cart for permitting the remaining inventory stored within a medication cart to be determined in an efficient manner.
Although medication carts, such as anesthesia carts, generally control the access to the individual compartment, a user may withdraw multiple vials from an individual compartment once the user has been granted access to the compartment. For example, if an anesthesiologist knows that he will need to administer the same medication to both the current patient and the next patient, the anesthesiologist may withdraw two vials of the particular medication from the respective compartment even though he has only been granted access to the compartment for the purposes of withdrawing the medication needed for the current patient so as to avoid having to access the same compartment on two occasions. This practice circumvents, however, the control otherwise provided by a medication cart with respect to the medication stored therein. As such, unit dose dispensers have been developed that limit access to one vial or medication, but unit dose dispensers are generally built within a drawer that must first be opened in order to retrieve the medication. As such, it would be desirable to provide an improved medication cart for providing controlled access to the medications stored therein, but which permitted authorized access in an efficient manner so as to reduce the likelihood of users being tempted to circumvent the control otherwise provided by a medication cart by withdrawing multiple vials of a medication.